Imagine two scenarios. In the first, an academic is threatened with termination if he/she speaks out publicly against the university’s proposed strategic plan. In the second, a manager is fired for disobeying a direct order from a superior about running down the company he/she works for. For most readers, I’d guess the first scenario is abhorrent, and the second quite understandable (if perhaps somewhat harsh). Yet both scenarios describe precisely what happened to University of Saskatchewan’s Dean, Robert Buckingham.
The Buckingham incident goes to the heart of a real live issue in Canadian universities: for whom do deans work – the President and Provost, or the faculty? Are they management’s tool to keep faculty in line, or do they represent the interests of their faculty in the halls of the power?
I don’t think there’s much doubt in a legal sense that Deans answer to senior management rather than faculty. But the way Deans are chosen usually incorporate a large amount of feedback from professors in that department, who want to make sure that the Dean is – to the extent possible – sympatico with their interests. And whether the Dean is a likable figure or not, he/she is very much expected to fight for the interests of that faculty and its members when it comes to things like resource allocation.
So, to Saskatoon where, as part of the university’s restructuring process, the 5-year-old School of Public Health Buckingham headed was slated, along with the School of Dentistry and the college of Medicine, to become part of an enlarged Faculty of Medicine. The School, which at least in its own eyes is pretty hot stuff having just received European accreditation for its program, was less than thrilled with the notion of being under the same roof as the College of Medicine, which has had a rough time with accreditation issues for the past few years.
Buckingham fought his corner spiritedly but quietly for several months. When Deans were recently told that the time for chat was over, and it was time for all the managers to fall in line, Buckingham chose not to do so. Instead, he wrote a letter (available here) that wound up in the StarPhoenix in which he effectively implied that: a) the President and Provost lacked courage, and b) that the College of Medicine was sub-standard. Within the next 24 hours, Buckingham was not only removed as Dean, but was also fired as a tenured professor, and escorted from campus.
Now, given the high level of tension on campus, and that Buckingham was only a few weeks away from retirement, it might have made more sense to let this incident go with a reprimand (and indeed, after much media attention, and an emergency meeting called by Advanced Ed Minister, Rob Norris, the University “reconsidered and reversed” parts of its initial decision). But make no mistake, within a managerial capacity, it was a fire-able offense: you can’t have your Deans going off and running down their colleagues’ departments in public.
Simply put, the freedom of comment that one has as a faculty member doesn’t apply to management. Buckingham’s line about “I’ve never seen academics be silenced like this” is somewhat disingenuous: Deans are management and held to a different standard. Saskatchewan was within its rights to ditch him as a Dean; where they overstepped, and have since clawed back on their decision, was in firing him as a professor, because that raises legitimate issues of academic freedom. As far as I know no professor has been dismissed for speaking out about university management since Norman Strax at UNB in 1968, and that’s not a place we want to go back to.
Both sides stepped over the line here, but it’s easy to see how it happened, and how it is likely to happen again. At the end of the day, deans’ identities and allegiances are split between their role as academics and their role as administrators. It’s a thankless and occasionally dangerous position.
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The situation is somewhat more complicated than you lay out, Alex. In some cases, in Canadian Universities, Deans are Senate appointments and to remove a Dean requires the Administration to steer a vote through a Seanate that may or may not be effectively controlled by the Administration. The balance of powers between Senate and Board (administration) seems to vary between institutions in Canada. Administration though generally controls the purse strings and that is often the ultimate management tool.
Just an observation that you could also take the very tension you describe about a Dean’s role and extend it to the level of Department Chairs/School Directors. I’d suggest that “Does the Dean work for the Provost or the Faculty?” is also often compounded by “Does the Chair work for the Dean or the Department?” The role of academic administration at the Faculty level is often further complicated by the reality that these tensions are actually two directions: In one capacity, they are attempting to balance their institutional responsibilities with efforts to advocate for and pursue their Faculty’s best interests; in the other, they are charged with leading their Chairs/Directors to focus on their ‘central’ responsibilities in the face of their own Department/Schools’ best interests.
At the risk of scuttling the “it’s more complicated even than that” contest I’d like to state my view, as a chair, that I work “for” the department and the University as a whole and not “for” one particular person in that institution.
No doubt the details vary from place to place, but the following is probably typical of a large number of Canadian universities.
When a full-time tenured faculty member is appointed to a Dean’s position they are then removed from the faculty association, i.e. are no longer part of the bargaining unit. This is the case at our university, in Ontario.
In some larger institutions it is my understanding that Associate Deans (titles may vary) also are removed from the bargaining unit, but our place does not have Associate Deans.
So looked at this way Deans are clearly not part of the rank and file while they occupy a management position.
In most universities Department Chairs (or equivalently program chairs, in some cases) continue to be members of the bargaining unit so the status of Chairs is really different.
I have been told more than once by members of the local faculty association executive that if the University decides to terminate a Dean (and not just send them back to faculty ranks), presumably for cause, then the association has no power to represent that Dean.
Further they said there is case law supporting the position that such unfortunates are not part of the bargaining unit and not entitled to protection or representation. I am not an expert on labour law and don’t know the legal details, but my interlocutors have extensive experience and were very confident in giving their opinion.
So I am thinking that in this case what saved this person was the public hoo ha, otherwise he would have been thrown under the bus, never to be heard from again.
As well, it seems that the decision to terminate this person was an intemperate one, and they could have handled it better, as Alex suggested.
Part of the back story I am sure is that the U. Sask is in a mess and nobody is going to be happy no matter what they do, given the size of their deficit.
Such is the lot of the academic administrator.
If deans or associate deans aren’t protected by the collective agreement, they’d still be protected by the tradition of tenure. I should think that they could still sue, and indeed ought to, as a matter of principle.
I don’t understand why firing him as a professor is an issue of academic freedom. I fail to understand how corporate governance is academic (outside of profs who actually study governance).
One other aspect that seems to be quickly becoming irrelevant in this discussion on campus is that the issue was never over his ability to protest, but over his public disclosures. He can still voice his opinions against a cost-cutting overhaul, but as Dean/prof, he has different avenues to do that than a regular professor.
I think you’re right, in the sense that academic freedom is a rather vague principle and not entirely applicable here. What’s more important, iwis, is the principle of collegial governance: faculty have a central role in determining the institution’s directions and policies (or rather, they should have, or they ideally do — it’s a matter of principle, not of fact).
If the university is making disastrous decisions, then faculty have as much right as and more responsibility than anyone else to make their voices heard.
That said, perhaps Dr. Buckingham should have shown his lack of confidence in the administration by leaving it. He could used his open letter to resign his administrative post.
That’s certainly my view. People with these dual roles are always free to go back to just having one if they disagree with the rest of the admin.
Your accidental nuclear detonation metaphor is, from what I’m hearing, a reasonably good description of what life is like in the admin building at U of S at the moment.
In this case the re-jigging plan hatched by administration (TransformUS) is so bad it is causing huge dissent in the university, and seems likely to result in a significant loss of quality. It is because people were silenced that the situation has gotten so out of hand. Clearly, Robert Buckingham felt concerned enough to take the measures he did. That should raise alarm bells among those who are supposed to be guarding the public interests of this publicly financed university.
While taxpayers of the province have invested billions in this institution, which is now overly controlled by corporate interests donating a few million – many institutions now serve the function not of education but as publicly financed training departments and R&D departments for corporations.
Meanwhile, the provincial government claims both that the province is experiencing an economic boom and pleading poverty when it comes to appropriately supporting public education and post-secondary education; thus, universities and schools become more vulnerable and in need of corporate dollars. It is a mess and the way administration handled this situation is a further indication of how messy it is.
With all due respect, Alex, I don’t think it’s easy to see how this happened. Attempting to fire a tenured faculty member is not a “mistake” (or whatever euphemism the overheads called it) but an enormity, clearly distinguishable from removing a faculty member from an administrative post.
The mere fact that they could possibly confuse the two actions shows that the responsible parties are unworthy of their positions.
It’s easy to see that the Dean mistook his academic freedom as a tenured faculty members as license to say what he liked even though he’s management (wrong), and easy to see how mgmt, who had bestowed tenure on him as a condition of his employment as a Dean (he was an external hire) might think that firing him from one job meant that he was fired from both (also wrong). Doesn’t seem that complicated to me.
To mix up a revocation of tenure with anything else whatsoever just shows that they don’t take tenure seriously enough. It’s like accidentally detonating a nuclear bomb.